I recently wrote my first post for the findingDulcinea blog, which honestly, you should be reading anyway, but just in case you aren’t, I thought I’d post a link to my first entry.

You can read it here.

It’s about…mountain climbing? Skydiving? Auto repair? Ok! You guessed it! It’s about pregnancy.

In other news from findingDulcinea this week, people - not teenagers who raid their little brother’s stash, mind you - but fully functioning adults, are taking drugs like Ritalin to outdo their competition in the workforce, Clark Rockefeller is even crazier than you thought and we’re profiling some of the speakers at this week’s Democratic National Convention, which, thank God, came just in time to replace our nightly viewing of the Olympics. I have no idea what we’re going to do when it’s over.

This afternoon, after deciding that if I was going to have vanilla frozen yogurt, for Christ’s sake, I at least deserved a few M&Ms on top, I opened the freezer to discover that the pound bag I’d bought a long time ago, way in the beginning of my pregnancy, was nearly empty, and so, with due ceremony, I finished them.

It’s official. I have been pregnant for 17 million years.

From: Kathleen Rotondaro
To: Cara McDonough
Date: Fri, Aug 22, 2008

One more thing about the rug–don’t get a white one. Your baby might lob a bottle of grape juice over the crib rails and on to the rug–like you did.

Love,
Mom

Last week I got sick. One minute I had a mildly sore throat and the next I was down for the count, lying in bed with a raging headache, severe congestion and general aches and pains. I ended up taking a sick day Friday, because even though I was scheduled to work from home that day, I couldn’t imagine keeping my head upright for enough hours to actually write a story on the computer. To actually write a sentence, one that would have made sense, anyway.

Luckily my cold was of the intense, but short, variety, and I pretty much recovered within three days, with only a few annoying symptoms–stuffy nose, the occasional cough–lingering this week.

The sick day was kind of nice, though, besides feeling horrible. I’ve been talking for the past few months about how I’d really enjoy getting up one morning, staying in bed, and just watching TV all day, I guess because that just seems like something I never have the time to do since there are always three million other things going on.

Of course, the thing about wanting to do things like stay in bed all day and watch TV, however, is that you always end up getting to do it in these not-so-great circumstances. Like you get to do it…but you use up an entire box of Kleenex while doing so because your nose is running that much. Whatever, I was willing to take what I could get and settled in for a marathon television/nap session that I honestly believe helped me recover more quickly.

The other great thing about being sick and therefore feeling no guilt about watching a ton of TV is that I’m sort of addicted to the Olympics and it meant extending my primetime viewing (J and I have been rushing home at night to make dinner and obsessively watch whatever Olympic competition is going on, even fighting falling asleep for the night when things get really exciting) to all-the-time viewing.

And when you get to watch the Olympics all the time, you get to watch stuff besides gymnastics and swimming and running, because let’s face it, that’s the good stuff and they save it for the biggest audience. You get to watch stuff that’s, you know, more ridiculous.

I mean, if you really think about it, a lot of Olympic sports are ridiculous. I know others share this view, because I’ve had this conversation many times. Like diving, for instance. Like jumping off a springboard and doing a few somersaults and a half-twist or whatever and then trying to enter the water splash-free. That’s weird. But we love it. And award good divers gold medals.

And water polo. Water polo. Competitors wear little helmets and play, like, some kind of soccer in the pool.

Anyway, I continued my TV watching into Saturday. I was feeling better, but didn’t want to push it, and so took a few opportunities to lie down on the couch and see what was going on over in Beijing. During one of these sessions I turned on the TV (permanently tuned to NBC) to discover an athlete jumping up and down on a trampoline, doing flips in the air. The trampolining competition. TRAMPOLINING. It’s one of those things where if someone had asked me to make up a funny, but not overly far-fetched, fake Olympic sport, this is what I might have come up with. “The competitors jump up and down on, like, your normal, backyard, trampoline, but are graded on the height of their jumps and the precision of their backflips!”

I know I shouldn’t make fun. There is no way I could perform Olympic level feats on a trampoline, I’d fall on my face, but I swear, in addition to the moments that make your heart race, when Michael Phelps is going for his eighth gold or Usain Bolt is totally kicking everyones asses, perhaps stumbling upon trampolining, an actual Olympic event, is another thing I love so much about the games. Finding perfection in the normally mundane. Realizing that, seriously, there really is something out there for everyone.

My father was talking with a woman the other day who had recently had a baby. He told her about J and I, and how we were still undecided about the name, to which she replied, “When they see the baby, they’ll just know.”

Apparently my father went home and told my mother about this conversation, who paused and then announced, loudly, “Pruneface.”

Last week I had a doctor’s appointment with a doctor I hadn’t seen yet, who happened to be the first doctor at my practice who has discussed how much weight I’ve gained so far. I’ve enjoyed the blissful ignorance up to now. Not really knowing, except for a rough estimate, how much weight I’ve gained, if what I’ve gained is normal or not, and if I should maybe start eating less. While I know some women are plagued with heartburn or feeling exceptionally “full” no matter how little they eat during the third trimester I seem to have the opposite problem which is that I can eat and eat, and still be hungry.

Finding out the amount of weight I’ve gained, however, turned out to be no problem, as I’m right on target (if I keep gaining at my current pace) to be within the guidelines for the recommended weight gain during pregnancy by the time I have the baby. This news was rather freeing, I must say. I hadn’t given any thought to how much I was eating up until a couple weeks ago. My eating habits have been healthy, definitely, more so than when I’m not pregnant, but not neurotic. I mean, if you read a guide on what to eat when you’re pregnant, you come away thinking kind of insane things, like “Jesus, I’m not getting enough kale” and I decided after the first month or so of pregnancy that common sense (like eating plenty of fruits and vegetables and protein) is probably just as good as any pregnancy diet guide.

Anyway, I’d been doing just fine, until a couple weeks ago, when I looked at my, you know, girth, and thought, “What if the baby is, like, 12 or 13 pounds?” J assured me this was a ridiculous concern, but I need not tell him (or you) that ridiculous or not, I’m rather good at dwelling on just this kind of fear, saying things like “If the baby is 12 pounds, it’s not going to come out,” over and over again. And explaining that if the baby is 12 or 13 pounds, I’ll know it’s because of all the ice cream I ate.

People have asked me if I have any cravings during pregnancy, and when I tell them ice cream, they tend to say things like “Well, yeah, I crave ice cream all the time so that doesn’t seem that strange,” and I’m like, “Haha, yeah, YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND.”

I’ve never been that much of a fan of sweet stuff. Of course I like it, love chocolate and cake and all of that, I’m not nuts, but I don’t go crazy over it. Until now. My desire for ice cream, which occurs at least a few times a week, might begin at, say, 10 a.m. and stays with me the entire day until I allow myself to have it, which, when I’m home, usually comes in the form of a modest, but satisfying, ice cream sundae with M&Ms and whipped cream on top. And when I say that it “stays with me” all day, what I mean is I think about the ice cream that I want so badly probably four out of every five minutes. See? That’s what I mean.

Needless to say, the completely irrational but still horrifying thought that I might be tipping the charts in the weight department and therefore growing a giant child inside my body was worrisome because, well, I didn’t want the doctors to yell at me, first of all, and I didn’t want to have to go through what would be an undeniably uncomfortable birthing process.

But I was also worried that I’d all of a sudden feel limited like I hadn’t yet in these many, long months.

So, the discovery that my weight gain is “just fine” is more to me than an indicator of my good general health. It’s like the doctor told me that what I believed was my worst habit is not only harmless, but maybe even good for me. Like just when I thought all the fun was over, someone tapped another keg and the party can go on.

“Sometimes I wonder, if I saw one of my old high school teachers, what would I call them? Like, would I call them Mr. or Mrs. whatever? Or by their first name?”

“I think you’d call them whatever you called them in high school. I think that’s normal.”

“I mean…if I saw one of my old coaches, I’d definitely call them ‘coach.’”

“Sure. Makes sense.”

“One of my coaches, Coach Jacobs, was also my teacher. But he didn’t want us to call him ‘Mr. Jacobs.’ He was like, ‘Call me Coach Jacobs. Or Coach. Or Jake.’”

“Was his first name Jake?”

“No, his last name was Jacobs. And Jake is a nickname for Jacobs.”

“Well, sort of. Except that it’s usually a nickname for Jacob when it’s somebody’s first name. What was his first name?”

“Tom.”

August is off to a good start. We’ve had several days of reprieve from the oppressively hot weather and I think I’m pretty much over the attitude I’d adopted a couple weeks ago, the one where I was like, “Oh my God. This thing is going to get bigger. How is that EVEN POSSIBLE?”

And while I still hate my swollen ankles with a sort of inappropriately high level of intensity for something so superficial, I’ve come to terms with them. I mean, I know I can’t really do anything about them except keep my feet up 24 hours-a-day, and since I can’t realistically do that, well, fine. I can deal. Maybe there’s even some good in this situation, I’ve been thinking. Perhaps when I’m in labor I can distract myself with reminders that once I push the baby out, my feet will most likely return to their normal size and I can stop wearing flip-flops every day. That sounds like good inspiration to me.

But seriously, things are great. We’ve got a house full of really cute, really soft baby stuff and a bunch of free weekends ahead. I’m sure anyone who knows us would not be surprised to find out that we haven’t done much in preparation for our upcoming arrival, but we are looking forward to the process. So I figure I better make use of the energy I do have while I’ve got it - the “nesting instinct” or whatever you’d like to call it - before this baby does, for real, take over my whole body and I’m forced to surrender. And, in this case, I’m pretty sure “surrendering” means lying on the couch watching my favorite movies whenever I feel like it, right? I thought so.

I have to give my husband credit for actually sticking with his hobby but there is a point, just before the four minute mark, when the guy is talking about making a ham radio, pauses, and I swear to God his face exactly resembles J’s that time he told me he wanted to start making his own soda.

Thanks to Sarah for passing on this hilarious video.

Because I’ve been a little bit of a slacker with the blog posts this week, I decided to see if I could get some other people take up the task, and wrote to my mother, father and husband yesterday asking them to send me a poem, haiku or a few brief lines about August. Hot, slow, lazy August.

Needless to say, my father answered the call. Below, what he has to say about this, the last month of summer, and a vacation he and my mother have planned, and even the state of the nation. Please feel free to add your own thoughts about August, the heat, summer in general, vacations or whatever you’d like in the comments section.

(By the way, when I responded to my father’s email, ensuring he meant this for Internet publication, he responded that, yes, he “wrote it for the bog.”)

Charles Kuralt wrote a wonderful book years ago called “America.” He had one chapter for each month in the year on the best place in America to be that month.

Not just nice vacations–but the basics–health care, good education, a life with dignity. But we’re going to get there and that really makes me happy.